Royal Caribbean International will sail from Shanghai with the 2019-built Spectrum of the Seas in April 2024, marking the brand’s return to China.
The Anthem of the Seas will reposition to Singapore for the 2024-25 cruise season, starting homeporting operations in October 2024.
Singapore was the first homeport in Asia to allow ships to restart cruises in late 2020.
Since then, the Spectrum of the Seas has been sailing cruises primarily from Singapore ranging from three to four nights.
The Spectrum of the Seas will reposition to China and will start offering sailings from Shanghai in April 2024. The ship will visit ports in Japan including Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Fukuoka and Nagasaki.
From Hong Kong, the Spectrum of the Seas will offer eight sailings with visits to Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Northern Europe’s largest gantry crane, nicknamed “Baby” at the Meyer Turku shipyard, lifted a single block of cabins for Royal Caribbean’s new Icon of the Seas, weighing more than 900 tons recently, Royal Caribbean Group officials said Tuesday.
The nine-deck, roughly 60-meter-wide block was moved in one day. It was the largest ever lifted in Europe, as far as shipyard officials knew.
Meyer Turku CEO Tim Meyer said there were no nerves in the move. His team had done a detailed study of how the steel would flex while being lifted and knew exactly how it should be handled while being moved into place.
“It’s very easy,” Meyer deadpanned. “It’s like building a Lego ship.”
While hoisting the cross-section of cruise ship cabins was a feat of engineering, it was also an example of Icon’s aggressive build schedule. Putting the blocks together shoreside is much faster than doing so on the ship, so the larger the block moved, the less schedule burden.
In all, the Icon consisted of 201 blocks, with roughly one installed a day. Each block required about 100 meters of welding once in place.
Building the world’s largest cruise ship meant roughly 2,600 workers a day coming to the Turku, Finland shipyard, representing some 20 nationalities from countless subcontractors. The ship will debut in Miami next January.
The Turku shipyard opened in 1737 — 58 years before the Meyer family started building ships.
Royal Caribbean Group President and CEO Jason Liberty called the yard the “tip of the spear” of innovation.
In their seventh generation of ownership and 228th year in operation, the Meyer family remains both focused and humble.
Patriarch Bernard Meyer, CEO of Meyer Werft, declined to spend much time looking backwards.
“We have no time to be proud; we have work to do,” he said.
The UK market has had to absorb additional capacity amounting to 316,000 more passengers, coming out of the pandemic in 2022 and 2023, according to the 2023 Cruise Industry News Annual Report.
The capacity growth was driven by P&O Cruises’ introducing two new ships in short order, the Iona and Arvia, boosting the brand’s capacity from just short of 550,000 in 2019, the last typical operating year, to nearly 800,000 in 2023.
The other major operator in the UK market is Marella Cruises, which will see its capacity grow from approximately 407,000 in 2023 to 440,000 by 2024. It remains at that level, barring any more ship introductions, and maintaining its position as the second-largest brand in the UK.
Thus, the national cruise supply is forecast to see little growth from 2023 to 2029, only increasing from approximately 1.6 million to 1.8 million passengers over the time period.
The P&O and Marella brands typically target different market segments, with P&O in the premium segment and Marella in the more price-conscious so-called budget segment.
Cunard Line is also based in Britain, but also markets its capacity in other countries, such as the United States, Australia, Germany and Japan.
Other more typical British brands include Fred. Olsen, Saga and newcomer Ambassador Cruises, with the latter taking up the slack where Cruise and Maritime have been.
As the second largest national cruise market in Europe, Princess and MSC also have ships dedicated to the UK market and other European and North American cruise lines market.
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